One of the most popular participation sports in America today is basketball. Perhaps there is not a boy in America who has not grown-up without "shooting" baskets or playing in a more formalized team game setting. No wonder then that basketball has spawned such a plethora of related indoor and outdoor games. These range from miniature table top basketball shooting devices to electronic basketball video games and on through to such informal arrangements as shooting crumpled paper balls into waste baskets at the office. The present invention is concerned with devices which are more of the scale of this last type of system, more particularly, indoor devices of somewhat reduced scale but where the overall playing "field" is in the range of five to fifteen feet, or larger. More particularly, the present invention is concerned with systems of this type which also incorporate means for return of a basketball to the player.
As might be expected, there is no shortage of devices for returning balls to basketball players, in order to remove the need for a person, who is practicing alone, to go after and retrieve the ball after each shot. See for example U.S. Pat. No. 4,579,340 to Jenkins et al. in which a tubular net is placed underneath the basketball hoop and basket in order to capture the ball after it goes through the hoop and return it to an automatic shooting device incorporating a solenoid operated plunger. Presumably, this device would also accommodate practice by a number of players with the shooting mechanism being aimed periodically in different directions in response to appropriate control inputs.
However, systems such as those disclosed by Jenkins et al. suffer from numerous disadvantages and disabilities. First of all, the systems are electrically powered and must thus be positioned near a source of power or be dependant on battery power. In addition, the systems are large and cumbersome and incorporate power operated parts resulting in making them expensive and difficult to move around. In addition to these costs, it is almost impossible to put such devices into the mass market without substantial modifications in view of their bulk, cost, and the like. Finally, the Jenkins device suffers from the problem of not being able to return balls which miss the basket, thus rendering it of interest primarily only to professionals.
Many of these problems are addressed in other patents, such as U.S. Pat. No. 3,776,550 of MacNabb. In MacNabb, a very large net is provided underneath a full size basketball hoop and net. Support for a large collection net positioned underneath the basketball hoop and net is provided by a specialized custom made structure of variously shaped and multi-armed support tubes of relatively great cost.
In addition to the net in MacNabb for collecting basketballs which may have missed the basketball hoop, the system also includes a non-flexible chute for receiving the ball at the bottom of the collection net and returning it to the player in a fixed position.
Like many other relatively large sized systems, the MacNabb system is relative expensive to manufacture, cumbersome to put in place, and has a fixed structure which reduces the flexibility of the environment within which the system may be used. While in many circumstances (such as a basketball court) this may not be an important factor, in the context of home use, flexibility to configure the system in a wide variety of configurations is as important a factor as the cost of the system together with such other important factors as the ease with which it may be shipped, moved, stored and so forth. Systems such as MacNabb fail to substantially address any of these problems in a fashion which would render them advantageous for use in the home.
To a certain extent U.S. Pat. No. 5,183,253 to Grimaldi et al. addresses some of these problems. It incorporates a large oversized net for capturing missed basketballs. The net is formed with straight members and supported on a number of feet. For this reason, it is possible that this system can be made relatively compact, although his long tubular ball return members are not susceptible of being substantially reduced in size. In Grimaldi, the collection net which is disposed beneath the basketball hoop is of relatively large size, in order to accommodate the possibility of the basketball missing the backboard, or hitting the backboard or the hoop in an unusual angle, resulting in a relatively large deviation in its path from the region proximately surrounding the basketball hoop. However, Grimaldi et al. like MacNabb, is a relatively fixed system taking up a large area and therefore requiring a large area in the home, if it is to be used, even in a somewhat reduced scale version. In addition, because Grimaldi uses simple dowels as his support members, the system suffers from rigidity problems insofar as forces tend to be concentrated at the joinder of the various dowel members or dowels. Finally, Grimaldi et al. suffers from the problem of having a fixed configuration and not one which may be readily adapted to fit a wide variety of environments with different obstacles creating various space requirements.